With a family history in Poland and the encumbrance of the Holocaust, Schwartz cannot visit that country like a casual tourist. A professional congress brought him to Warsaw for four days, where his ignorance of his antecedents came back to oppress him. Personal, scholarly and professional feelings become crossed and confused.
Continue reading “353 Back to/from Poland”
Jewish subjects
335 A Hebrew Bible page for Paul Huvenne
On the retirement of Paul Huvenne as director of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, the museum offered him a surprise friendship album with contributions by 76 colleagues and friends, mainly art historians and artists. The theme, as I reported in the postscript to Schwartzlist 334, was Beelddenken – thinking in images. The book opens with Paul’s own definition of the word: “Beelddenken is the ability to form and develop thoughts in wordless images and to picture, express and communicate them directly. In Western culture, thinking in images is the repudiated opponent of thinking in words. This bypasses the fact that most words are image thoughts and that the most abstract concepts are easier imagined than articulated.” The engaging and dedicated young woman who thought up and edited the volume, Katharina van Cauteren, to whom the authors as well as the dedicatee are deeply indebted, asked the contributors to write brief reflections on any visual object of their choice, not necessarily a work of art. Continue reading “335 A Hebrew Bible page for Paul Huvenne”
333 Food guide to Washington Heights in 1953
A yeshiva boy’s food memories, topped by Mrs. Hrzka’s potluck kitchen on West 181st Street. Continue reading “333 Food guide to Washington Heights in 1953”
202 Old and new wounds
On the painting of an Apocalypse that has already come and will never be really gone, by the Dutch Nazi artist Henri van de Velde.
“Oude en nieuwe wonden,” Het Financieele Dagblad, 31 January 2004, p. 25
309 Pseudo-Semitism
As a reader of Hebrew, Schwartz has long been intrigued by the occurrence of lettering in that language in works of art. He examines a sample of works from the 15th century, now on view in Bruges, to find out how much Hebrew they contain and whether it means anything, either as text or as a symptom of Jewish-Christian relations. His conclusion: it means neither. Continue reading “309 Pseudo-Semitism”
276 Non-Jewish museums
The historical museums of Europe ignore minorities and therefore lend implicit support to xenophobic national self-images. The rise of high-quality Jewish museums serves as an excuse for historical museums to eliminate the Jewish dimension of European history from their displays. A campaign to redress the balance is called for. Continue reading “276 Non-Jewish museums”